The idea of “postmodernism rightly understood” is, I think, a really good way of situating the place of “great books” in higher education today. It doesn’t point to some uncritical veneration for the best that’s been thought and said in the past. But it does show why that thought might teach us what we need to know about our real greatness that’s very tough for us to learn in any other way.

My title was attacked as an oxymoron. “Rightly understood,” some said, was contrary to the postmodern spirits of irony and the celebration of diverse perspectives. It smacked of discredited patriarchal and logocentric prejudices.

But the title is really meant to be a bit ironic. “Rightly understood” means, first of all, that genuine postmodernism would be a return to realism. It would be a rejection of the modern prejudice that all reality is socially constructed, that we’re not hardwired, so to speak, to know the real truth about who we are. Postmodernism rightly understood is a return to the idea of purposeful human nature or rejection of the modern dualism between mechanistic nature and human freedom.

Not only that: “Postmodernism rightly understood” means that a genuine postmodernist would have to be ambiguously conservative, as opposed to a “leftist” or a “progressive.”

Progressives have to believe that the modern world is all about progress toward a perfected or universal or homogeneous society, where all human beings are equally recognized in their dignity. The key human fact is that we’re progressing toward justice, and justice is perfectly compatible with personal liberation.

“‘Rightly understood’ means that genuine postmodernism would be a return to realism.”Progressives, characteristically, have missed the irony of Marx. Marx says that modern, liberal, capitalist progress has been toward greater and greater misery. The great mass of human beings is being reduced to nothing. All human distinctions based on love, nobility, and personal goodness—on anything but productivity or money—are melting into thin air.

Marx affirms this growing weightlessness or personal isolation and anxiety as progressive only because it will produce a revolution that will bring the miserable “bourgeois individual” to an end. Modern misery is good because it can turn bourgeois fear into revolutionary hatred. The resulting revolution by people who have become nothing will somehow make them into “everything”—into beings who live however they please in a completely unalienated fashion. History, Marx really believed, is about to come to an end with the simultaneous perfection, somehow, of personal liberation and human community.

But if you don’t believe in the possibility of such a progressive revolution—and surely it’s postmodern not to believe in such grand historical narratives—then what’s called modern progress can’t be unambiguously affirmed as good for human beings. Genuine postmodern irony is seeing that today, like most days, things are getting better and worse.

The good, modern news is that oppressive distinctions such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation are being leveled by the market and an individualistic understanding of justice. The bad news is the same thing is happening to the virtuous human distinctions rooted in love and loyalty—not to mention those rooted in living truthfully and responsibly as beings born to die. So we live, more than ever, in a meritocracy based on productivity. People are more economically and psychologically on their own than ever; the upside of liberation has been at the price of a heightened sense of personal contingency and loneliness.

So to be postmodern is to come to terms with the downsides of modern progress seen by Marx: Its emptying of human life of its real content, and its atomistic inattention to personal significance. To be postmodern is to have such “conservative” concerns while appreciating the undeniable gains when it comes to productivity and justice.

The genuinely postmodern effort is to subordinate all the useful modern inventions and liberations to realistic human purpose. We human beings, the truth is, are open to the truth about who we are, and so we are give enjoyments and duties not given to the other animals. We’re given the responsibility of living well in light of what we can’t help but know.

Racism, sexism, classism and the Great Books.

From my postmodern view, maybe the chief purpose of higher education, is then to counter the dominant view of who we are-–which is partly true and partly degrading prejudice—of our time. Our tendency is to view human beings as free and productive—as autonomous individuals with interests. This means that we don’t regard anyone as less than a being with interests—or as existing merely to serve others. We all have a right to look out for our own interests, and so to be treated as individuals and not merely as part of some larger whole. That means that it’s not really news to any of us that racism, sexism, classism, and so forth are wrong, and we usually think that it’s an affront to our dignity to be thought of as merely parents or citizens or creatures. We tend to be all about autonomy and self-definition.

But we’re weak—often very weak—in thinking of people as more than productive or self-interested beings. We tend to think that human distinctions that can’t be measured quantitatively aren’t real, just as we tend to think that a true meritocracy is based on productivity. We tend to think that because the great authors of the great books of the past must have been racists, sexists, and classists and, of couse, not as technologically advanced or as productive as we are, they have nothing real to say to us. So our prejudice is to study them critically—or condescendingly—as remnants of discredited prejudices.

We also tend to think that words are weapons. They don’t reflect reality but are ways of technically imposing ourselves on others and on nature. So we too readily believe that even the greatest books of the past were really instruments of domination. Plato’s Dialogues were really in support of Greek aristocracy and patriarchy, and The Federalist defends political institutions that would protect elitist property rights. When we read even a “great book,” we ask, too complacently, whose interest was it written to serve? We are so certain about our superiority when it comes to productivity and justice that we to think we know, before reading a word of Shakespeare, that there’s nothing real to be learned from him about who we are.

Our prejudice, to be blunt, is that we believe that there’s nothing real—nothing to be known—about love and death. We’ve just about forgotten that a rational being—a being with logos—is necessarily also an erotic being. We’ve forgotten how to think about whole human persons; we’ve forgotten how to think about the purposes or point of being human.

Whatever their shortcomings, the best authors of the past—and even, of course, the best authors of our time—aren’t in the thrall of our prejudice that we’re merely productive beings. They think love and virtue are real, and that we’re stuck with both as self-conscious mortals in this world. They know a lot about us that we usually and quite wrongly think we don’t need to know to live well.

Higher education is about the coming to terms with the full truth about who we are. And surely our deepest pedagogical prejudice, the one that keeps from coming to terms with the true greatness and misery of being human, is that education can be reduced to technology or what’s required for productivity and a polemic against residual racism, classcism, and sexism. For us, genuine higher education should begin with the thought that rational and erotic beings are more than productive and autonomous individuals, and the best books for us are those that show us most deeply and eloquently why that is.

Postmodernism rightly understood opens us to what’s true for us in “premodern” thought, without dismissing what’s both true and new in our great modern accomplishments.